ISSUE 01: STATE(D) VIOLENCE
ABOUT
MIRIAM SAPERSTEIN
Miriam Saperstein is a Philly-based artist with a deep love for disabled access-artistry, water-oriented rituals, and hanging out on the porch. Recent collaborations have included curating a touch-based art exhibit in West Philly as part of the collective Hook&Loop and teaching critical map-making with the Desert Writing Lab at Bulk Space in Detroit. Their work on incantation bowls and yearning has been exhibited at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and the William Way LGBT Community Center and published in Syllabus, smoke and mold, and BathHouse. Find them online at miriamsaperstein.com or @bitter_water_babe on Instagram (for now).
STATEMENT
I finished quarantining from my most recent and most debilitating COVID infection on October 7th, 2023, awash in fatigue and brain fog, reckoning with a new era of genocide against Palestinians. This last year has been one of deep grief for me around the interconnectedness of capitalism’s disposal of my body, climate catastrophe—how it makes me sick and is leveraged against oppressed peoples, and multiple genocides. I have had to change the way I write, the way I gather with others, the way I plan and organize. I have turned to art to feel the grief and imagine a way forward when the methods of living I was accustomed to are no longer accessible. This piece is also influenced by Jonathan Shamir in Jewish Currents: “The Hösses’ Colonial Paradise,” and how sickness and forced isolation via covid denialism, as well as the grief over the destruction of homes in Palestine has shifted my relationship to being at home.
TO BUILD A HOME
I can’t work but the 401k company still emails,
encouraging me to “find my retirement inspiration.”
Will I find my dreams of a peaceful
death in the body of this email?
In the belly of this beast,
or in my creaky bones?
I’d have liked to grow old in a world
that wasn’t crafted by weapons
manufacturers to dismember and de—
oh here is my brain fog—dismember,
disinherit, disintuit, disaster, debilitate!
Yes, debilitate the many artists, lovers,
neighbors who planted flowers in the spring
and garlic in the late fall.
I can’t bend over without throwing up so there goes
my woodland cottage fantasy.
I’ve opted to rearrange the living room instead—
if we only had more storage
for all this stuff I bought, Instagramable lebensraum.
I’m a phone call away from interpersonal catharsis,
a therapy session off from reprogramming
my stress response. Building blocks of a good life.
Hand-crafted foundations, as in, the politician
who wrote her name on the bomb,
signed with a heart. To say
the unspeakable, to court the violence of home-making.
“Inspiration”—that I might live
another day, or that the heatwave break,
to walk outside and not suffer for it.
That some of the seeds survive
the bombing. From Philly to Gaza,
all the scales of destruction—lungs,
neighborhoods, horizons. I’d like
to say we take debilitation and turn it
into disability pride but that
is actually a neoliberal scheme
to wash the places I love off the map
while we’re all distracted with a parade
photo-op. So Divestment it is.
From banks and from Wellness.
My 401k was always built on: don’t get sick,
don’t ask for help, don’t dive deep
into the peonies. The bees are dying, too.
The most ancient lichen, crumbling
the oldest stones as they figure out
if they have it in them to survive
to see another epoch.
There is nothing inherently human
about capitalism, nothing ancient
about nation states. The inspiration
is a land grab, a phantom belonging
meant to distract from the real thing.
Tell that to the New Jersey synagogue
raffling off settlement investments
along the coast—a beach vacation would do you
some good, the vapors do amazing things for the body, said
the tuberculosis doctor. Old ailments
re-emerging after the nice Jewish boys from New Jersey
bomb Gaza’s sanitation system, glaciers melting
releasing prehistoric bacteria, military
carbon emissions are not measured
in passive voice or at all, if the newspaper
profits, someone is getting very rich.
A friend and I discuss—there is nothing
morally good about suffering. What I like
to imagine is that there are moral goods:
my friends who mask in public,
stimming, the rain in the heatwave.
We make a text thread with friends
who bring me meals during this crash.
I can’t see the doctor for seven more
months. I can’t wrap my head around more
months of genocide, let alone one life, let
alone watching the whole time, this whole
year of sickness and falling out of time.
I want to lay down in the street and wail
the refrain in my body for months.
And how many intersections have you blocked?
No ones paying you to be a professional mourner.
That’s so shtetlcore of you reference, how niche
your memory map of the traumatized body.
Don’t worry about being stuck in bed,
we have the VHS tapes of Holocaust porn at home.
I won’t be going to grad school it seems,
but writing love poems from bed.
Relieved to delay paying tuition
to the war machine. But I almost did.
Feel better soon!
This fragile, fragile web the only
security net. And it’s still being
sewn. Imagine what it could be
if we put a little bit towards it
every day, like a spider in the eaves
of the shed. Or in the pots
I haven’t been able to plant in—
abandoned by larger forces,
we build a home. How violent.
Nothing moral in that, would rather
have some funding without sacrifice.
Some of the seeds will live, some sperm
smuggled out of prison, a clearheaded day,
a principled stance taken up by millions,
a remembering of brilliant
beauty stolen, my inadequacy
in the face of Empire, that when G!d
calls me to the witness stand, I will say,
I did not do enough
I gave all I could
to calling the doctor and
expanding my sense of self.
I applied to grad school
when I needed to apply
myself to feeding
my neighbors. I will say
I was grieving individually,
when the collective
grief was demanded,
that grief that only the ground can hold.